Scarlett was sleeping. She had been since we got home. She only got up when I made her. She would take a bite or two of food, visit the bathroom—the obsessive habit of brushing her teeth hadn’t changed—and then would claim that she couldn’t keep her eyes open any longer. We had argued over her taking the pills earlier. I knew she was still in some pain, and I didn’t begrudge her, but the pain she tried to suppress wasn’t just physical.
It was starting to make me antsy.
I couldn’t stand how she’d turn her back on me in our bed, so even when it was time to sleep, I sat outside of our room. But I hadn’t been sleeping much.
“How is she?”
I shot back the whiskey, not even bothering to taste it. “The same. All she wants to do is sleep.”
He nodded, staring into his cup of spiked tea. “It will take a while. It is new yet. However, we will watch her to make sure she is not falling under the spell of depression. Once the evils become a part of the mind, it is hard to dispel them. There are times when the mind will convince the body of it being too far gone to even attempt to rise. You will have to set a barrier before it does.”
I sat forward, eyes closed, head hanging, hands to my forehead. “Talk to her. Explain to her why she couldn’t have known. About the baby.”
“Is that troubling her?”
“Così tanto.”Very much so.
“Ah, I see. I will.” I could feel the warmth of his body as he leaned forward. I could smell the mixture of tea and whiskey on his breath. He rested a hand on my back. “Permettetemi di essere il tuo confidente come mi è stato di tuo nonno. Dimmi il tuo problema nipote.”Let me be your confidant, as I was to your grandfather. Tell me your trouble, nephew.
The hallway was dim. We sat in a pool of moody light from the window, and even with my eyes closed, the strike of lightning that blazed across the sky seemed to sear across the darkness behind my lids.“I’m terrified of losing my wife,” I said in Italian. The words came out softly, barely louder than the whirling of the wind outside, but in my head, they were as powerful as thunder.
The door opened downstairs. More voices rose from the kitchen. Not loud, only enough to hear. Rocco and Rosaria, Dario and Carmen, followed by Romeo.
“E 'un buon profumo qui. Quando mangiamo?” Romeo said, and I could almost hear him sniffing.It smells good in here. When do we eat?
“We brought more candles,” Carmen said. “It’s supposed to be a bad one.”
“I’ll light the fires,” Rocco said, voice drifting further into the house.
Time meant nothing to me, and however longer later, the front door opened again.
Whispered voices floated up like a breeze. Mitch and Violet were in the middle of a conversation about the weather, along with Mick telling Mary that she couldn’t have a sucker until after supper. Maggie Beautiful told him to give the kid a break. Aberto offered to show them how to make puppets while they waited.
It wasn’t until then that I realized I had spoken one of my fears out loud. I opened one eye to find Tito staring at me, a look of concentration on his face.
“She will survive this,” he said, not a hint of doubt. “So will you. Take comfort in that, if you can find it in nothing else. No matter what is happening to us, life moves forward, even if we feel we cannot. Then one day we wake to a new day and are able to look at the miles behind us; yes, with sadness, but we can also look forward with a deeper sense of hope. Time is like that—a trusted friend up until the end. Then it goes, like everyone and everything.”
He took a sip of tea, the liquid going down hard. Heahhdbefore he set his cup down on the small table between us. “I know this, nephew, because I have been through something similar myself.” He leaned forward, body in a similar position to mine. “Lola did not almost die, but she lost all the same. Afterward, a cruel trick of fate, I got the mumps, older than usual. There was no help for the matter. For a woman who desperately wanted children, what was a man to do? It was the deathblow to our hope. Ah,” he growled, sitting back. “I left her.”
“You left Lola.”
“I am an educated man, nephew, but I never said that I was logical.” He grinned, but the joke was on him. “If leaving her meant her happiness, I was prepared to give her that, at least. She would not have it. She almost tore my ear off, dragging me back home. It took time for her to come around after she lost, and it took me leaving for her to come to her senses—her words, not mine—” he lifted his hands “—after I was diagnosed as sterile. She told me that she knew me and that she loved me. She would rather live with me than live without me. We were enough. This made no sense to me, but who am I to argue with her logic?”
“Who are any of us?” My head swayed and felt loose on my shoulders, as though it might fall and roll along the floor.
“Some of them will have to make beds on the floor—”
I blinked, realizing that Tito had continued to talk, but I wasn’t sure about what. I must have dozed.
He patted my shoulder, rising. “Get some sleep, nephew. I am going to rouse ourpoco ballerinoand see if I cannot talk to her and get her to sit up for a while.”
A cold draft crawled up the steps, in stark contrast to the warm aromas and temperature of the house. Fires blazed, sconces glowed, and hundreds of candles swayed and created monstrous shadows in preparation for the loss of electricity. Yet the air held static, an electricity that seemed to come from another source.
The storm had begun outside, driving rain beating against the roof in heavy sheets, but it had nothing on what was brewing inside.
“I should have known,” I muttered to myself, coming out of sleep with the jerk of a man who wakes from a dream of falling.
Charlotte’s voice, so clear and sharp in comparison to the muted ones, met me easily. She was going on and on about the villa they had found. Her voice was cheery, almost ecstatic. Her attitude reeked of smug superiority. This was a rare stroke of happiness for her.
